McMafia Exposes the Dirty Secrets of Globalized Crime

A New Mobster Epic for a New Era of Organized Crime

In 2008 former Guardian and BBC Central Europe correspondent Misha Glenny published McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. Glenny was best known for having covered the fratricidal disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The nonfiction book was the fruit of several decades of investigation into the post-Cold War, cyber-savvy, interconnected world of 21st century organized crime that began in Eastern Europe and radiated out to Latin America, Africa and Asia. Glenny estimated that the newly corporatized world of criminal enterprise accounted for approximately fifteen per cent of the world’s GDP. From the ever-spreading tentacles of the Russian mafia, the thuggish rise of Eastern Europe’s newly non-socialist criminal gangs to the new international players in the Colombian and Mexican Cartels, Southeast Asian triads, and the favelas of Rio, global crime was reorganizing and using technology to communicate, profit and evade capture.

McMafia looks at how Russian organized criminals, smartening up their act from the simple track-suited and blingy thugishness of the vory v zakone (“thieves-in-law”) ex-convict gangs, mixed seamlessly with the new post-Soviet state of the Putin era. It investigates how Balkan people-traffickers moved drugs, guns and women across “borderless” Western Europe, how teenage hackers in drab blocks of flats in Novosibirsk made millions for gangsters in St Petersburg on the dark net selling credit card numbers, and how (once again teenage) hackers in Brazil made their gang bosses rich by discreetly removing a penny or two from every bank account in Belgium overnight. McMafia joined the dots — from the Rio favelas, Bogota high rises and sprawling shantytowns of Juarez, to the wealthy urban centers of Moscow, London, and Bangkok. Glenny reveals the links between a cocaine deal on an LA street to forced prostitution in a Paris suburb to money laundering in the New York art world. It seemed the old players were out and a new establishment had replaced them: concerns about the Five Families in New York, the Sicilian Mafiosi, old time London bank robbers or cognac-sipping pimps in Marseille prove redundant in the time of McMafia. And, we are all culpable if we’ve ever illegally downloaded a movie, taken ecstasy, bought a fake Prada bag or Rolex watch. Who hasn’t fallen for a phishing scam or been slipped a fake twenty-dollar bill?

Glenny sold the film and TV rights to McMafia right off the bat. Everyone could see there was something there, something significantly different from the old-school mob and gangster flicks we’d all seen a million times. There was talk of a movie, but a long-form TV drama offered a seemingly better way for the McMafia story to be told. There’s no avoiding the fact that today’s world of organized crime is complex, interconnected, and thrives because it often operates in grey areas where jurisdiction is complicated and contested. Leather jackets are out; Brioni suits are in; sitting around in smoky East End pubs or sipping endless espressos in Little Italy is old style and boring; a luxury mega-yacht in Ibiza, a Mayfair restaurant with wine prices in the six figures is now and cool. Gangsters look like bankers, bankers often are gangsters, and the one needs the other till they seamlessly merge into a single first-class airport lounge of shady deals and crooked practices that span the globe.

We are all culpable if we’ve ever illegally downloaded a movie, taken ecstasy, bought a fake Prada bag or Rolex watch.

Glenny sat in a room with a team of scriptwriters led by Hossein Amini (who, among other things, adapted Patricia Highsmith’s Two Faces of January and John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor) and writer/director James Watkins (who directed the Idris-Elba-in-Paris flick The Take and the gothic-horror The Woman in Black). He explained the world of McMafia. Using the true accounts from the book. they came up with a story. The UK’s Cuba Pictures, with the BBC and AMC in America filmed in London, Moscow, Dubai, Mumbai, the South of France, Prague and Croatia (standing in for Tel Aviv), and now we have McMafia the TV show. The cast is as international as the crime in the world of McMafia. English heartthrob James Norton (more usually seen in Grantchester solving cozy murders in 1950s Cambridgeshire) alongside David Strathairn as a Russian-Israeli, though in general Russians are played by Russian actors, Indians by Indians, Israelis by Israelis and so forth.

So what’s the story? Well, Alex Godman (Norton) is the English-raised son of old school Moscow mafia exiles. He’s a legitimate fund manager in London with a fiancé, nice lifestyle and a charming mews house. But a murder brings his more rough edged and bare-knuckle family’s Moscow underworld past back to life. Alex is drawn into the criminal spider’s web his murdered uncle has woven. Now he must betray his own values in order to protect those he loves. As the plot moves along so we are given a crash course in global crime. Russian drug money is laundered through Prague in the form of a factory producing bootleg FC Barcelona shirts; Mexican cartel money flows into Moscow via Dubai in the hope of access to Russian ports; Russian girls end up being forced to prostitute themselves in Eilat; Mumbai hackers facilitate the drug shipments and, of course, most of the money ends up moving illicitly and secretly through the ask-no-questions gentleman’s club that is the City of London financial district.

On the surface the world of McMafia is one where gangsters act like businessmen, mix easily with politicians (both corrupt and too stupid to know who they’re talking to), crossover with the intelligence services who see their value, and “private security firms” who normalize thuggery. The regular police are either on the take or too hopelessly out of the loop to ever understand what’s happening around them. Nobody in law enforcement is even close to being as global as the criminals. Of course, ultimately, crimes are crimes and the nasty will out: not all problems can be solved over chilled vodka and caviar in a Moscow nightclub, a crisp Saumur on the Côte d’Azur, or in a St James’s Square boardroom; not all complications can be resolved by tweaking an Excel spreadsheet. Blood will have to be shed.

All eight episodes of McMafia have now aired in the UK (AMC started airing the show on Monday, February 26th). It’s fair to say that initial reaction was divided. The show, which broadcast on Sunday evenings, was decidedly more international in terms of locations, cast and languages than the UK’s usual Sunday night fare of cozies and comedies. It was also the case that it was not a star-studded show—Norton is a golden boy of UK TV at the moment, but the rest of the cast was basically unknown to UK TV audiences. This took adjustment for some.

Others felt the show a little too complicated at first or too slow. But most stuck with the show and, like great slow burn TV or a good weighty novel, it ultimately paid dividends. BBC viewing figures (and the now all important catch-up numbers of viewers streaming the show) held up well over the series despite it being a non-traditional crime show—no fighting cops or clever detectives, just bad guys and blurred lines. The complexity, the complicated-ness of the storyline became, for many, its core appeal much as the BBC’s 2016 adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager with Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie had moved from some initial reviews claiming it was too complicated, to universal praise for intelligent primetime TV providing strong ratings.

The question now is what will America make of McMafia? Subtitles are even rarer on US screens than in the UK (though perhaps the popularity of Narcos is helping that?). With the exception of Strathairn it’s a pretty unknown cast to American audiences (those that don’t adore Masterpiece on PBS anyway); the locations will mostly be generally unknown, but the McMafia phenomenon is the prime criminal force shaping the US as much as Europe, the Middle East or Asia. That fake Michael Kors bag on sale in Times Square, that rom-com you downloaded illegally, that guy on the phone who sounds like your favorite grandson and just needs your PIN number to check something on your account—that’s you and McMafia right there.